Sunday, August 30, 2015

Helping People in the Developing World Have Safe Surgery: "This is my Purpose Now"

Christina with friends and a pressure cooker.

In spring I met Christina Fast, a remarkable young woman from Calgary who has found a passion
to help people in the developing world have safe surgery. Her story reminds me
of the quote by Mr. Rogers about what to do when the world seems an
overwhelming place: “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my
mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people
who are helping.” Christina is one of the helpers.

There's a lot
of bad news in the world today—conflict, terrorism, refugee flight, not
to mention worries about natural disasters and the economy.

Sometimes, things can
seem so hopeless.

But now and then you
hear something that gives hope. That’s what I felt recently when I talked to a
young woman from Calgary who is making surgery safer for patients in some of
the world’s poorest countries. .

Christina Fast, 28, is a sterile process technician and teacher at a college in
that Alberta city. In 2011 she volunteered to serve with Mercy Ships, an
international faith-based charity that provides medical services to some
of the world’s poorest people in the developing world.

At first, she thought her job would only be sterilizing equipment on the
ship, which was docked in Sierra Leone . But one day she went ashore
to visit a local hospital in Freetown . She was shocked by what she found.

“There were no functioning sterilizers,” she says. “It was probably
the worst conditions I could ever imagine. I was in disbelief at what
I saw.”

In Canada , medical instruments are routinely sterilized after each use in
sophisticated machines called autoclaves. As a result, all patients in this
country can expect to leave surgery without picking up an infection—it would
take a serious breakdown in procedures for anyone to get sick.

But what Fast saw in the Freetown hospital was things like scalpels,
clamps, retractors and other items simply put in a plastic pail of chlorine,
rinsed, dried and used on the next patient.

The result? Most people got sick, and many died.

“One doctor I spoke to
said that 90 percent of patients developed infections after surgery,” she says.

Shaken, Fast went back to the ship with a new idea—and a new sense of calling
and resolve. God’s plan for her, she decided, was not just to sterilize
instruments on the ship, but to help African hospitals learn how to do it,
too.

And so a non-profit
organization called SPECT—Sterile Processing Education
Charitable Trust—was born.

With help from a Grand Challenges grant from the Canadian government, and
support from her family and friends, Fast is exploring ways to
help hospitals in the developing world cheaply, sustainably
and effectively sterilize medical instruments.

At first, she wasn’t sure how to do it. Autoclaves are expensive. And even if a
hospital in the developing world could afford one—or was given one free—there’s
no one qualified to operate them or fix them if they break.

Plus, since electricity in many places in the developing world can
be spotty, even if they had trained technicians a power failure would
render them useless.

For a while, she was stumped. But then she and a colleague came up with a
simple, low-tech idea: Pressure cookers.

After rounds of experimentation,
they discovered that ordinary pressure cookers could produce enough heat and
steam for a long enough time to sterilize surgical instruments.

“I didn’t think it would
work, but it did,” she says of the simple method, which finds instruments suspended
in a wire container above the water.

Not only do they work,
they are inexpensive, easy to buy in Africa , have no moving parts and don’t
require electricity—they can be used on a gas stove or a wood fire.

Now Fast is on a mission
to raise enough money to provide pressure cookers to as many hospitals as she
can in Africa, and to provide training for people about how to effectively use
them.

She finds fundraising to
be a daunting task—much harder than actually doing the work she loves in
Africa ..

“I’m not a good salesperson,” she says. “I tell my stories and let them speak
for themselves. If it moves others, I invite them to help.”

Despite the challenges, Fast feels she’s where God wants her to be.

“Lives are being saved,”
she says. “This is my purpose now.”

So there’s your good news for today—proof that there are some good things
happening in the world. And you can bring hope to others, too, by
donating to SPECT so that patients in the developing world, just like
patients in Canada, can expect to go home from hospital after surgery in
better shape than when they arrived.